


Twas The Day After Thanksgiving

by EventHorizon



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cooking, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, Holidays, M/M, Thanksgiving, a little Christmas tossed in too, mystrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27743881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EventHorizon/pseuds/EventHorizon
Summary: The day after Thanksgiving was not the date Mycroft would have predicted for his lover going insane, but the enormous turkey in their kitchen proved him wrong...
Relationships: Mycroft Holmes & Greg Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes/Greg Lestrade
Comments: 42
Kudos: 169
Collections: Mystrade Holiday 2020





	Twas The Day After Thanksgiving

Mycroft’s life ledger boasted only one tally mark in the column for lovingly and devotedly giving his heart to another person. That tally mark was now in perilous danger of being scratched out.

“That is a turkey.”

Greg whirled around and grinned happily at Mycroft, now emerged from his study after a short, albeit unplanned, morning of work.

“The mole’s out of his hole!”

“Verily, however, I wonder if the entrance to my burrow was shifted because… that is a turkey.”

“Not a live one, though, so your moley self doesn’t have to worry about becoming a bite of lunch. If turkeys eat moles, that is. Does the US even have moles? That’s the sort of thing they _should_ teach in school but I rather suspect got chopped in the last national curriculum debacle.”

That did not sufficiently address the turkey. The turkey, here, was paramount.

“Why is there a turkey in the kitchen, Gregory?”

“Where else am I supposed to cook it?”

“Cook it?”

“We’re certainly not going to eat it raw.”

“The bird is the size of a wombat.”

“Are wombats edible? That’s another thing the kiddies should be learning in school. Important stuff! More wombats, less dates of treaties that got tossed into the bin later, so why worry about them now?”

Stepping fully into their kitchen, Mycroft lifted the cup next to Greg’s hand and took a long sniff.

“Smells nice, doesn’t it?”

“No, but it lacks alcohol vapors, which was my investigatory intent.”

“I’m not a morning drinker. Usually. Got some of that special coffee they sell with spices and whatnot. Makes the day more festive.”

“There is little special about a Friday.”

And why are we not discussing the turkey? It is the proverbial elephant in the room! And nearly as large…

“It’s _Black_ Friday!”

“A vulgar, contrived example of mass hysteria that, not to put to fine a point on it, lacks turkeys.”

“Turkey sandwiches.”

“You are cooking an entire turkey for a sandwich?”

Madness came in many forms, but this one might warrant an entire chapter in a psychiatric textbook.

“No! Americans have turkey sandwiches on Black Friday.”

“I doubt that.”

“Alright, maybe not all, but some do and, in any case, that’s not really the point because Birdy here isn’t actually part of a Black Friday celebration or anything, he’s just…”

A sheepish look rose on Greg’s face that prompted Mycroft to brace himself against the kitchen island in preparation for the arrival of… news.

“… it’s like this, ummmmm… you know about Thanksgiving, right?”

Mycroft wasn’t quite as oblivious to popular culture as many might believe, so knew precisely what he was doing when he had a _The Office_ stare into the camera moment.

“Ok, you do. Good! Didn’t think otherwise, really, but best to check nonetheless. I thought I’d do us a surprise and make a Thanksgiving dinner because… why not? Loads of food and a few drinks and…”

“What were you watching on the television, Gregory?”

“I wasn’t… _Planes, Trains and Automobiles_.”

“Not a word of that was ‘turkey’ or ‘Thanksgiving.’ “

“It’s a Thanksgiving film! Sort of. In any case, I started thinking that it would be fun to do a big Thanksgiving meal since we’ve never done that sort of thing before.”

Mycroft looked again at the pachyderm-sized turkey and back at Greg.

“Perhaps because neither of us is a velociraptor who can swallow that whole?”

And that was only _one_ of the nearly infinite number of reasons that Mycroft could imagine for never having a gargantuturkey in the kitchen or to celebrate the decidedly-American holiday.

“Can’t eat it whole! There’d be nothing left for sandwiches.”

“Gregory… I am now convinced you are insane. Even from a temporal standpoint, this is madness.”

“What’s a temporal standpoint?”

“Today is not Thanksgiving.”

The sheepish look had returned. Admittedly, his Gregory wore it well, but that would not erase even a scintilla of his descent into lunacy.

“Ok… ummmm… I didn’t take it out early enough to thaw.”

Mycroft a third time looked at his avian nemesis and back at his lover. His daily requirement of exercise handily being met by the neck stretches.

“1975?”

“It’s not _that_ big.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Well, you’re wrong. It only needed one extra day from what the shop predicted… ok, I can’t lie. They actually told me exactly when you take it out to thaw and I forgot. I tried thinking warm thoughts to hurry it along, but that didn’t work, obviously.”

Mycroft heaved in a large breath and counted to five. Then ten. Then wondered if it was too early for scotch.

“Upon concocting this plan, mightn’t it have occurred to you to purchase a fresh bird?”

“I can’t kill a turkey!”

“Fresh as in deceased, yet not frozen.”

“Can’t do that. Not traditional.”

Damn the hour, this demands scotch!

“Traditional?”

“Yeah, traditional. You’ve got to have a frozen bird that you thaw and then cook all day to eat. This is the way.”

“You are not a Mandalorian.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if I was, though?”

“Not if you still believed yourself bound to ape a tradition completely alien to your own species.”

“British isn’t a species. And Thanksgiving is… just look at the name! It’s a day to give thanks, all in all, despite there being a specific reason it got started, so why not?”

Mycroft struck a pose that would be the envy of any woman pointing out the prizes on a game show.

“Voila!”

“Don’t mock the bird. It’s sacrilegious.”

“Oh my god…”

“SO as I was saying, I took the turkey out too late for it to be ready for yesterday but it worked out for the better! I got pulled in for a new case, so I couldn’t have cooked anyway. So, today is now my official free day and it lines up with the one you decided to take when you thought you could use it to your advantage with my new schedule and shag all day.”

“Something which I shall immediately decline if you attempt, for any reason, to involve the turkey.” 

“You’re loony. But, you’ll be a fat and fed loony in short order. Or long order. It’s going to take a long time to cook that plump fellow. Fell _ess_. It’s a lady turkey.”

“What?”

“A lady turkey. Apparently… it’s not easy, actually, picking one of these and I did a bit of reading on the subject..”

“You Googled lady turkeys. I am having that permanently scrubbed from your Internet record.”

“That’s not nearly the worst thing I’ve Googled and you know it. Anyway… I sort of did do that and decided that a nice fat lady turkey was the one I wanted.”

Mycroft had an academic-level awareness of the size of turkeys, but seeing one, even minus certain salient anatomical parts, made him wonder if they were the basis of the Bigfoot legends.

“I have a question.”

“Only one? That’s surprising.”

“True, but this one involves the dimensions of Bigfoot…”

“What?”

Why did they not keep scotch in the kitchen? Oh… yes. Mustn’t forget the famous midnight preparation-of-chips-while-exceedingly-intoxicated escapade for Gregory’s birthday. Actually, it _was_ best to forget that for the sake of all parties involved.

“I meant the turkey and the interior capacity of the freezing compartment of our refrigerator. The two are by no means compatible.”

“Oh, right. Anderson did childminding duty.”

“Pardon?”

“Ok, actually his mum did that because she’s got one of those big chest freezers for some reason he can’t fathom except she’s being prepared for the day she snaps, murders him or his dad, and needs a place to hide the body. I collected it from her and brought it to Molly for thawing.”

Mycroft knew a single Molly and his look at the turkey was now something other than astonished.

“That was in the morgue?”

“Sure!”

“It goes into the rubbish this instant.”

“No! And besides, it wasn’t in one of the drawers. They’ve got a new refrigerator to store samples and the like, but got to keep the old one, too, and that’s where they keep their lunch and snacks. Once in awhile other things, but not while our turkey was in there! I asked.”

“That bird was first placed in the receptacle of a speculatively-murdered corpse, then with a plethora of the deceased before gracing our kitchen. This… I have no idea what to say.”

“Just say it’s great!”

“That would be a lie.”

“No, it wouldn’t because our turkey was kept clean and cold and all at the per-spec temperatures those cooking programs natter on about so it’ll be very safe to eat once I get it cooked. Probably. And that would be because I didn’t cook it to the right temperature, but I will because I got a thermometer, one of those digital ones, that’ll take judgement on my part out of the story. Which is smart, given I’ve already not shown good judgement about the whole thawing business.”

Mycroft used his hands as a measuring tool for the turkey and transported his size metric to the oven where he was shocked to find there existed a small bit of room on each side of his hands which would accommodate a… ah ha!

“Your plan is doomed for we have nothing in which to roast that thing.”

“My plan’s not doomed because I thought of that!”

Greg skipped towards the walk-in pantry and emerged with a roasting pan, so large and heavy his arms seemed to be shaking with the effort of transporting it to the stovetop.

“See. And I already measured it so I know it fits. This one. The first didn’t. It fit the oven, that is, but not the turkey. I made sure to wash it, though, before taking it back for an exchange, even though I don’t actually think the turkey touched anything. I fathomed out fairly quickly when I tried to lower it in that it was somewhat a futile effort.”

A family of six, and their cat, could comfortably live in that roasting pan with room to spare for a boarder to help offset the mortgage.

“If that amount of metal was recycled, Gregory Lestrade, it would be sufficient for a battleship.”

“Doubtful. Besides, you need more than one type of metal for a ship, I suspect, and this seems fairly uniform. So, any further naysaying or are you ready to help me with things?”

Looking back and seeing nobody else had entered the kitchen while they were speaking, Mycroft turned towards Greg and hesitated only a moment before laughing.

“Moi?”

“Absolutely! It’ll be fun. We can cook together and listen to music or put on a film since we’ve got that lovely telly built into the wall because you’re more a film addict than I am. There’s loads to do and doing it together will make the day that much more special.”

Narrowing his eyes at Greg’s cheeky grin, Mycroft also mentally gave Greg a nod of admiration at the manipulative tactic. Points deducted for making it so very obvious but those points added back since his beloved undoubtedly made it so very obvious in order to make the situation all that more adorable. Such a cunning foe…

“I suppose if you cannot be swayed from this path…”

“Swaying will not occur!”

“The raised finger was a delightful touch, my dear. In any case, if you cannot be swayed from this path, then it is not entirely a burden for me to hand you the various paraphernalia you require to accomplish this task.”

“And make pies.”

“Pies?”

“Yeah.”

“Plural?”

“Apple, pumpkin and pecan.”

“You must be joking.”

“Nope, and that’s not all! We’ve got bread to bake, though we’ve got that machine of yours to help with it. A pan of stuffing. Or dressing. There’s a debate about those… from a lot of angles… but I found an amazing recipe, so yeah. And potatoes, broccoli, carrots, brussels sprouts, probably something else I’m forgetting. Right! Sweet potatoes. That’s mandatory, apparently. Maybe. They’re going to be delicious, regardless.”

Once again, Mycroft was looking about the kitchen and still found himself and his partner to be the only living creatures present.

“That is enough food for an army.”

“Tue, but it keeps. And I promised I’d bring Molly a thank-you package. And Anderson. And John, because he gadded about the city to find my pecans, not that he had better to do since he was hiding from Sherlock who wanted a sample of spinal fluid for some reason or other and had begun to look at John in that special way that never means anything good. And Donovan because she heard about Anderson getting one and pouted. Anthea, too, because I paid for the turkey and roasting pan with my bank card and worried you’d learn of it and that’d ruin the surprise, so I asked her to do some magic so you wouldn’t and that’s her payment for being sneaky and possibly a financial criminal.”

Yes, it was definitely madness. But a jolly madness, all things considered.

“I see. You are creating a feast that will then be packaged and delivered to accomplices throughout London.”

“I’ll be like Father Christmas, though I’ll have to warn people not to shake their gift to guess what’s inside.”

People. The eternal botheration and agony of people. However, in small, managed doses… possibly tolerable. Gregory had gone to such great lengths and to have it result in cold, packaged, day-old offerings of goodwill… the mere thought was unacceptable.

“Would it not be simpler to invite the recipients to join the celebration?”

“What? Really?”

“There is little doubt you… we… shall spend countless hours preparing this meal and it seems more fitting that the culmination of that labor be a large table of guests partaking of the _fruits_ of said labor.”

“Fruit! Forgot that. We should have fruit. Or should we? Is fruit Thanksgivingy? There’s apple in a pie, but I’m not sure that counts.”

“We may adjust the menu, as necessary, if warranted. However, if we do not make a start, we certainly shall not bring to life your grand culinary vision.”

Greg beamed so brightly, Mycroft was certain the turkey began roasting from the warm and brilliant rays.

“Thank you, love. Thank you so, so much. This is going to be wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Spend the day with you, then have an actual celebration to cap it off. This is what that whole Thanksgiving business is about, right? Celebrating the things you’re thankful for. Friends, family and the one you love most in the world.”

Stepping forward to embrace the person _he_ loved most in the world, Mycroft took a deep breath of Greg’s familiar scent and reveled in the feel of the body nestled snugly against his. His dear, dear Gregory was utterly demented, at times, but in the most surprising and joyful ways. Yes, today would be an unholy amount of work, but all would serve to grow their portfolio of memories and that was a treasure beyond price.

“I wholeheartedly agree. Now, I suggest we make a start. What would you have me to do as my first task?”

“Ummm… pie dough?”

“I have absolutely no idea how to prepare a crust for a pie.”

“Mrs. Hudson did and I wrote down everything she said in… ooh, there’s my Don’t Forget This You Stellar Idiot pad. It’s in there after the turkey cooking instructions. Ignore my drawings because turkeys are to get to look right.”

“Yes, of course. And I suppose Mrs. Hudson was slated to receive one of your gratitude gifts of food in exchange for her wisdom and experience.”

“That and a bit of plastering for a wall that… let’s just say Sherlock and leave it at that. Saves her the cost of having a professional in to do it.”

Hence another place was laid at their table. Given they were opening their home to guest, perhaps one further could be added. He did owe Lady Smallwood for a dinner last week and this could be viewed as repayment. Further, she had been a colossal pain in the arse over the Peru matter and this could also be viewed as revenge, given the cavalcade of characters that would be present. Thanksgiving… a day for giving thanks and he was _very_ thankful for any opportunity to both repay a debt and enact vengeance in a single, solitary blow. Perhaps this could become a yearly tradition…

“A fair price, without question. I shall, then, begin with a study of pie-making and… what shall we choose for our background entertainment?”

“How about some Christmas music?”

“You cannot be serious.”

“Why not? Christmas season has officially begun and, who knows… maybe this will get us in the mood to make a start on that, too.”

“Involving what, might I ask?”

“Putting up a few decorations, keeping an eye out for the perfect tree, a few more nights with a hot chocolate in one of my hands and _your_ hand in the other.”

His Gregory was definitely a madman. Madmen were often geniuses, however…

“A delightful suggestion. Though… need I ask if the Christmas season shall be met with an equivalent amount of cooking?”

“Hmmmm… maybe a smidgen.”

“Define smidgen.”

“Well… a stuffed goose can’t be that much harder to cook than a turkey, can it?”

Geniuses were often madmen, too… mustn’t forget one went hand in hand with the other…


End file.
